History and mission

CCI was founded in 2006 by professor Thomas W. Malone. To a great extent, this is a continuation of the research Malone and his colleagues have conducted at the Center for Coordination Science[2], as well as within initiatives such as “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century”.

The center’s mission is to find novel answers to one basic research motif: “How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?'”

In order to answer this question, the researchers conduct three types of research:

Zeitgeist (pronounced[ˈt͡saɪtgaɪst] (help·info)) is a German language expression literally translated: Zeit, time; Geist, spirit, meaning “the spirit of the age and its society“. The word zeitgeist describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era or also a trend. In German, the word has more layers of meaning than the English translation, including the fact that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events.

The German Romantics, habitually tempted to reduce the past to essences, treated the Zeitgeist as a historical character in its own right, rather than a generalized description for an era.

Definitions

“Zeitgeist” refers to the ethos of an identified group of people, that expresses a particular world view which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

Zeitgeist is the experience of a dominant cultural climate that defines, particularly in Hegelian thinking, an era in the dialectical progression of a people or the world at large. Hegel’s main contribution to the formulation of the concept of Volksgeist is the attribution of a historical character to the concept. The spirit of a nation is one of the manifestations of “World Spirit” (Weltgeist). That Spirit is essentially alive and active throughout mankind’s history. Now, the spirit of a nation is an intermediate stage of world history as the history of the World Spirit. The World Spirit gives impetus to the realization of the historical spirits of various nations (Volksgeister’).

The spirits of individual nations are both the articulations (Gliederungen) of an organization and its realization. The spirits of individual nations represent a segment of the World Spirit out of which emerges the unlimited universal spirit. A comparison is introduced here between the status of an individual and that of a nation’s spirit. In the process of his formation the individual undergoes various changes without, however, losing his identity. As a part of world history, a nation—exhibiting a certain trend expressed in its Volksgeist— plays its part in the total process of world history. But once it contributes its share to world history it can no longer play a role in the process of world history. The submersion in the total process prevents a people’s cultural rebirth, because it has exhausted its creativity in the historical growth of its guiding spirit.

Collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.[1] This term was used by the French social theorist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) in his books The Division of Labour (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

In The Division of Labour, Durkheim argued that in “traditional” or “simpler” societies (those based around clan, family or tribal relationships), religion played an important role in uniting members through the creation of a common consciousness (conscience collective in the original French). In societies of this type, the contents of an individual’s consciousness are largely shared in common with all other members of their society, creating a mechanical solidarity through mutual likeness.

Collective Unconscious, sometimes known as Collective Subconscious, is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. While Freud did not distinguish between an “individual psychology” and a “collective psychology”, Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personalsubconscious particular to each human being. The collective unconscious is also known as “a reservoir of the experiences of our species.”[1]
In the “Definitions” chapter of Jung’s seminal work Psychological Types, under the definition of “collective” Jung references representations collectives, a term coined by Levy-Bruhlin his 1910 book How Natives Think. Jung says this is what he describes as the collective unconscious. Freud, on the other hand, did not accept the idea of a collective unconscious.